Savannah Morning News/Marcus E. Howard - Famed environmentalist Erin Brockovich stands in front of the King America Finishing during her visit to investigate the factory's alleged role in polluting the Ogeechee River.

Dressed in knee-high black boots and a black leather jacket, Erin Brockovich brought her trademark style of environmental activism to bear on the problems of the Ogeechee River Friday.

“It’s time for the people to direct and drive regulation,” she told a group of Ogeechee landowners at the Old Freeman Family Farm in Cooperville.

Brockovich, who visited Savannah at the invitation of the Ogeechee Riverkeeper, vowed to begin an investigation of the black water stream’s pollution. She and associate Bob Bowcock later spoke to a crowd of about 200 outside at Love’s Seafood Restaurant, with the river itself as her backdrop. They had heard the landowners’ worries, she said.

“They live here; I don’t. They see and know things; I don’t,” Brockovich said. “The problem is no one is listening. That’s where we have to start helping people and create awareness. Their concern was since this fish kill, they have now noticed an absence of wildlife.”

At both stops they announced a plan to develop a testing protocol to get to the bottom of the river’s problems and to help the Riverkeeper implement that testing regime. They offered both expertise and funding for the effort. But volunteers will be needed, Brockovich said.

“For decades companies have been playing out where the regulations go,” Brockovich said at Love’s. “What gives me hope is you coming out in force and taking back your rights to clean water and land.”

The Ogeechee was the site in 2011 of the state’s largest-ever fish kill, with 38,000 fish estimated dead, all downstream from the King America Finishing textile factory in Screven County. In the subsequent investigation, state regulators determined the factory had been operating a flame retardant line without a water discharge permit for five years. The state issued a permit in August but revoked it in October after it was challenged in court.

Brockovich and Bowcock want to test the Ogeechee for a broad suite of contaminants, which is what the state and the company should have been doing all along, they said.

Formaldehyde and ammonia are among the substances state regulators have found in testing the river, though not at levels that exceeded limits, according to the state Environmental Protection Division.

“Formaldehyde is not the only one we’ll be looking for,” Bowcock said. “There are 500-600 other chemicals and by-products. It’s going to be very expensive and very long.”

Brockovich said companies and regulators can and do test selectively to avoid finding high levels that would trigger regulatory action.

“You can test all day long and you can test when the contaminants might not be coming out,” she said. “There are a lot of things that affect that. In order to get an accurate idea of what’s going on you almost have to do it on an ongoing, on a year-round basis. And if the state doesn’t want to find something it’s easy for them not to find it.”

Brockovich was a young mother of three who swore like a sailor and dressed like a doll when she became a legal assistant in the early 1990s and worked both those propensities, along with brains and tenacity, to help win a $333 million settlement with a California utility over groundwater contamination. An eponymous box office hit starring Julia Roberts cemented her name in the public consciousness. Now she consults with communities around the country facing environmental and other consumer issues. She’s been involved in another 100 cases with settlements totalling more than $1 billion.

Among her current causes is following up on that original groundwater contamination, which she said Pacific Gas and Electric failed to properly clean up despite the lawsuit.

Brockovich spent a good deal of Friday listening to the concerns of those who live around the Ogeechee, a river many love and now mourn as lost.

To those who told her of illness in neighbors and family members, she urged openness.

“Unfortunately, you, as well as the fish can tell a story.”

She sympathized with complaints about the apparent apathy of regulators.

“What it takes is us as citizens pushing back against the agency,” she said. “For goodness sake, it’s supposed to be there to protect us.”

And to the question presented at Love’s of how long it would take for the clean up to get started, Bowcock said he knew what should happen:

“They are discharging with a revoked permit from the state,” he said. “If the federal government is watching, they should take away the state of Georgia’s primacy and shut them down. That it’s going on today makes me sick. There’s a right way and a wrong way to do this and they’re just illegally waste discharging.”

ON THE WEB

Go to savannahnow.com to watch Erin Brockovich talk about the Ogeechee River at King America Finishing and also at Love’s Seafood.

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"Companies and regulators can and do test selectively to avoid finding high levels that would trigger regulatory action."

"....a plan to develop a testing protocol to get to the bottom of the river’s problems and to help the Riverkeeper implement that testing regime. They offered both expertise and funding for the effort."

Millions of gallons of drinking water daily are taken from our rivers to cool nuclear and coal plants. Much of this water is simply evaporated, leaving low river water levels to filter more and more toxins that are permitted to be dumped. This will only get worse. Solar and wind energy take nothing from our water resources and should be seen as the "open door" to the future of other non-water intensive energy development. We have known for decades that our water is in jeopardy .... if we don't do something that is within our power to do, we only have ourselves to blame, and our children will be the ones to suffer. They will suffer more from lack of water than from paying off the national debt!

Bravo Claudia!
I applaud your post on clean energy & water...
Georgia, having recently won the dubious title of most "Corrupt" state in the Union is far removed from enacting responsible legislation.Laws that promotes the general financial welfare of the citizen taxpayers are rare indeed. Although corporate "special interest" and their Lobbyist find it very easy to purchase "the best politicians money can buy" at the Atlanta Capital :(
Going forward,solar, geo-thermal & wind renewables must be part of Georgia's energy equation!
If we're to establish a sane,fair and equitable playing field in this state Georgia Power's monopoly must be brought to an immediate END!
Having been fleeced long enough,citizens should nothing less.